"Moore's law is a term that got applied to a curve
I plotted in the mid-sixties showing the increase in complexity of integrated
circuits versus time. It's been expanded to include a lot more than that,
and I'm happy to take credit for all of it."-- Gordon Moore

Moore's
Law

1965

Writing for Electronics magazine in 1965, Gordon
Moore made an awesome prediction. He noted that for the last three
years, the number of components on an integrated chip had doubled
yearly. At that point, a chip averaged about 50 elements. Moore announced
that this trend would continue for another ten years, with chips doubling
in complexity until they reached 65,000 components per chip. That
number was mind-boggling at the time. Moore's prediction turned out
to be true -- far more accurate than Moore had ever thought it would
be. In fact, the complexity of a chip continued to double yearly for
long after 1975. The rate of doubling has only recently slowed to
about every 18 months.